The Man with the Red Bag (12 page)

H
e went that night.

I'd already figured out how he was going to get back to Mount Rushmore and how we could follow him.

Our motel was long and L-shaped. All the doors and windows faced the parking lot. There was an upstairs and a downstairs. The Star Tours people were booked in the lower level.

As soon as Scotty drove us in I saw the bicycles. They were in a rack. There would have been six of them, but two were out when we parked. I saw
Charles Stavros eye them. He walked over to the rack, pulled one out, examined it, put it back, and asked Declan, “Are these for us?”

“For any of the guests to use. Enjoy!” Declan said.

It was three miles back along the road to Mount Rushmore. Not a hard walk. But a bike would make it even easier.

I was thinking logically, which was strange. It was almost as if, now that the time had come, I was ready. Except…

“Geneva,” I said. “You have to be the watcher. It won't be dark for at least two hours and I have to sleep. I don't think anything's going to happen while it's daylight. And this is perfect. You can see his door from the window of your room. It won't be hard at all.”

She didn't argue. “Okay,” she said. “But only two hours. Set your alarm.”

Oh, that bed! It felt as good as it looked. When the buzzer went off I staggered outside, blinking in the sunlight. “More sleep, more sleep!” my brain screamed. “When all this is over,” I promised it.

Geneva burst out of her room. “I thought you
were never getting up,” she grumbled. “I'm so bored with staring at those parked cars. I memorized all the license numbers, if you want to know how bored I was. And it was a waste of time. Stavros never appeared.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You'd have liked it more if he had?”

She gave me one of her famous looks.

“We have to make plans,” I said.

We sat on one of the green wooden benches outside our rooms.

Geneva had borrowed her dad's cell phone. I had Grandma's.

“Is this really going to happen?” Geneva asked. “It's as if we've been playacting all this time. You know, making it up as we went along. And now…I still think it's a game.”

She was wearing the rodeo cap, turned backward, a navy blue sweatshirt that said
JACKSON LAKE
and exactly matched her fake eyes, baggy jeans, and running shoes. And the butterfly necklace. I had a feeling she'd never take that off.

Charles Stavros came out of his room then and I
stiffened. But he just looked up at the sky and went back inside.

“Checking the weather,” I whispered to Geneva and shivered, even though it wasn't cold. I leaned back against the hard bench and concentrated on not drifting off to sleep. In books, detectives never seem to sleep. Maybe a person needs practice not sleeping.

Geneva was messing around with the phone, making the dial light up, turning it off again.

“Did your dad mind lending it?” I asked. “What did you tell him?”

“That you and I wanted to talk, room to room. Don't worry. He didn't make any Declan kind of remark.”

I nodded, then asked, “Do you like him better now than at the beginning? Your dad?”

“Yep,” she said.

“Was it your mom who kind of turned you against him?”

“Hey!” She sat up straight. “Don't you go dissing my mom!”

“I'm not. I just wondered.”

She didn't look at me or say anything else and I
could tell I'd guessed right, even if she didn't want to say.

I kept watching Stavros's door. It was going to be dark soon. TV sets flickered inside rooms. I could see odd movements through Buffo and Blessing's window and it took a while to realize they were doing floor exercises, popping up into view and then disappearing, like puppets in a shadow box.

The Doves' drapes were closed.

So were Stavros's.

“What time do you think he'll go?” Geneva asked.

“When it's really dark.”

“Kev? Do we know what we're going to do when we catch him with the bomb?”

“Definitely.” I sounded surer than I was. “First we'll rush him and knock him out before he can do anything. Then we'll call 911.”

“How are we going to knock him out? He's big.”

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “I have a plan.”

Geneva stared hard at me. “Don't you tell me not to worry in that kind of a voice! It's like giving me a pat on the head. I'm in this as much as you are. I hate it when I'm patronized. Don't you dare do it!”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

The light was almost gone. A fan of birds, chirping and calling to each other, hurried home to their nests. Little points of light sparked here and there. I wondered if they were fireflies. I wondered if they had fireflies in South Dakota. There was no breeze, but I was shivering again.

“I wish that ranger had found the bomb,” Geneva said. “I mean, how can you miss a bomb?”

“You're thinking of something huge. Bombs can be little now. No bigger than a cell phone. Or a camera.” I paused. “Besides, we figured he must have hidden it somewhere.”

“I thought you said it was big and bulky,” Geneva muttered.

“They can be any size,” I said with authority. “It doesn't matter. Either kind works.”

 

He went at midnight. The witching hour. I was spying from my window and I saw him come out his door, carrying the red bag and the shovel, still in its wrappings. It was fully dark, but there were lights in the parking lot and a bright three-quarter moon that
was like a yellow scoop in the sky.

I dialed frantically. My fingers didn't want to work on the small keys of the cell. Geneva wasn't answering and wasn't answering.

“C'mon, c'mon!” I muttered.

She was asleep. I knew it. She was going to blow the whole thing. I didn't want to do this alone. Why couldn't she have stayed up on this night of all nights?

And then I heard her voice, fully awake, scared. “Kevin?”

“He's going. Wait till he rides out of the driveway.”

I watched him from my darkened room as he took the bike he'd looked at before, hung the red bag from its handlebars, and balanced the shovel across them.

My backpack was ready. The only things in it were my flashlight and the glass globe that I'd bought for my mom in the Jackson Lake Lodge gift shop. The globe was heavy. Inside it was an image of the snow-topped Tetons, and when you shook it, snowflakes swirled around. Would I have the guts to use it, to crack Stavros over the head with it? In all the mystery stories I'd read, the detective had never, that
I could remember, used a snow globe for a weapon. But a detective has to be flexible and use whatever is available.

I saw Geneva's door open, and I opened mine and closed it quietly behind me. In the connecting room next to mine, Grandma was asleep. I hoped.

Geneva and I met at the bike racks. Carefully, carefully we lifted two bikes to the ground, not speaking, everything going as we had planned.

 

There were no lights at the front of our bikes, or his. Not that any of us would have switched one on. But at the back, on the wheels, were red lights that turned and turned as you pedaled. We could see his, quite a bit in front of us.

The sky was black. The scoop of moon, partly covered by drifts of clouds, came and disappeared. On either side of us, bushes whispered and rustled. What was in there? Bears? No, probably just deer. Hopefully deer.

One mile.

Two. Three.

“Look!” Geneva breathed, and in a flare of moon
light I saw the four heads silhouetted against the sky. Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln. I had a sudden memory of first grade, making silhouettes of ourselves with black paper, gluing them onto white paper, taking them home. Mom hugging me. “Oh, Kevin! It's you!”

I was breaking up, getting jumpier every minute.
Stop it, Kevin. Just stop it.

Ahead of us, the red lights stopped moving.

“Kev?” Geneva whispered.

“Shh.”

We slid off our bikes and laid them silently at the side of the road. To our left was a pasture. There was the faraway glint of black water. Everywhere I looked there were mountains, the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Badlands were there, too, not far away, and drifting against the night sky were the four American presidents that Charles Stavros had come to destroy.

About fifty feet ahead of us a flashlight went on.

“Down,” I whispered.

We threw ourselves on our stomachs on the road.

I raised my head, just a little, and saw him squeeze
through the sparse bushes into a dirt field. His flashlight was the kind that's also a lantern. Push once for the flashlight part, push twice and you had a small fluorescent lamp. Stavros had set it beside him. The red bag was open next to him. With his good hand he was unwrapping the shovel, unfolding the handle.

We lay there beside the trunk of an old fallen tree, as still as the tree itself.

The night silence was broken by the sluff and scuffle of a shovel turning over earth. Moonlight silvered the small tufts of grass.

“Now,” I whispered. “We have to stop him now.”

We went on all fours, hugging the ground, closing the gap. My almost-empty backpack flapped against my shoulders. Pebbles jabbed at my hands. Geneva was a little behind me. I could hear her breath, little raspy grunts, and I wanted to whisper, “Be quieter, can't you?” But I knew I was probably breathing the same way. We dropped prone and watched.

He was about twenty yards ahead of us now. How long would it take us to reach him? It was like the old school problem: “If a train leaves the station…”

Stop it, Kevin. Concentrate. Slay the dragon.

I shrugged off my backpack, eased it to the ground, unzipped it a little, careful of the noise. The glass globe! That's all I would need.

“Stay here and call 911,” I whispered.

“No.”

“Yes.”

I stood, realizing that Geneva was beside me and that we were both running toward him, blundering through the bushes.

“Hey!” I shouted. “What do you think you're doing?”

He was on his knees and he'd lifted something from the bag and was lowering it into the hole he'd dug.

“Stop!” I roared.

“Give up, you're surrounded!” Geneva yelled.

I saw his startled face. I saw his hands, covered with loose earth, lift out of the hole. The element of surprise, I thought.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

I almost shouted it. Instead I raised the snow globe of the Tetons.

The snowflakes inside danced and glittered in the lantern light.

At the top of the arc, at the release point for a pitcher, I stuttered to a stop. His face was turned up to me. How could I smash this down on anybody's face, even if he was a terrorist?

I couldn't.

“Get him,” I yelled at Geneva and the two of us threw ourselves on top of him. The lantern was knocked over. He was grunting, saying, “What the—” and then, “Kevin? You followed me? What…?”

We were rolling over together, the three of us.

“Grab his arm,” I shouted. I had his bandaged one, but I wouldn't be able to hold on to it for long. I sat on his head.

His legs scissored and kicked.

“Ouch!” Geneva said.

“We need to—” I panted. “We need to tie him up.” But I hadn't thought of that. I'd only thought of knocking him out. We had no rope. Nothing.

He had wriggled free, and in the light from the tumbled-over lantern he was standing over us now, massive, dark, terrifying.

“Are you kids crazy?” But there was a shakiness in his voice. “Who else is with you?” he asked, peering into the darkness.

Never admit you're alone. I didn't know if I'd read that or just knew it.

“Everybody,” I said quickly, and Geneva said again, “Give up, you're surrounded.”

He listened. So did we. Nothing but silence, not even the sounds of the animals. We'd scared them into silence. I looked up and there were the presidents, way, way above us, maybe a mile away, still, impassive, ageless, mysterious.

I'm doing this for you, I told them silently.

“You thought you were going to blow up those guys.” I pointed with a trembling hand.

“No way,” Geneva said. Her voice quivered.

“What do you mean, blow them up?” Stavros took a step toward the red bag. Oh my gosh! What if he did have a gun in there? He put his hand inside it.

I tried to stand in front of Geneva but she shoved me away. She was dialing the phone, saying, “Drat, drat.” And then her shoulders slumped. “There's no signal.”

The mountains, I thought. Of course there's no signal. Why didn't we think of that?

“Run,” I yelled, and I knew I should run, too, but I couldn't.

We stood, frozen in time, staring at what Stavros had taken from the bag. “It's a boot,” I whispered. A boot! How could that be?

“Yes. The other one's already in the hole,” Stavros said.

“The bomb's in a boot?” Geneva asked incredulously.

Stavros turned to us. “No bomb. Come on! Did you really think I had a bomb?

“You've been carrying those two old boots around all this time?” My voice rose to a squeak. Dull, worn, black. Old, misshapen. Two boots.
That's
why the bag had been so heavy.

“They were my father's,” Stavros said as if that explained everything.

“But…why?”

He didn't answer. Instead he bent and gently lowered the boot into the hole with the other. He spaded the loose dirt on top, then crouched and patted the
earth smooth. His head was bent, his eyes closed. It was as if we weren't there. I could knock him out now if I wanted. He wouldn't even see me coming. But…I had this strong feeling that he was praying, or maybe not.

Neither Geneva nor I spoke.